Could the U.S. without Cali be a real thing?
California tooks its post-election protests to a very intense, very new level recently. The Golden State is seriously questioning its statehood, and the secession movement has gained real momentum that’s becoming hard to ignore.
What seemed like a saucy Twitter hashtag at first has swelled into a concrete movement. Named after Brexit, #Calexit is proposing that the state become its very own country. In reaction to the news of president-elect Trump, the state with a sizeable amount of voters in opposition to him chose to join the Yes California Independence Campaign. Yes California’s numbers jumped from 1,500 members to approximately 12,00 after the election results were posted.
Every state has tried to secede at one point or another. Texas, the biggest at everything, has always been the biggest supporter of its own secession. It even claimed to be a sovereign state for nine years somehow, though the claim wasn’t recognized by Mexico, and Texas didn’t actually control all of its supposedly claimed territory. Still, the Texas Nationalist Movement has always been a strong one, and continues to be.
But even with all the attempts dating back to the Civil War, the Constitution of the United States gives no roadmap for states removing themselves from the Union, only adding themselves to the mix. United is in the name, after all.
However, don’t mark California’s attempts at secession off as an impossibility just yet. Their case is different. In Texas, an independence referendum requires a legislator to put the issue on the ballot, whereas in California, citizens can directly propose a referendum without involving any lawmakers.
California is the most populous state, has the largest single-state economy in America, and boasts the highest agricultural output of any state. At the same time, there’s a plethora of federal assets and land within its borders. Plus, can you imagine what the new country’s military would look like?
Everybody's favorite French diplomat and snooper Alexis de Tocqueville once said that if "one of these same states wanted to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be quite difficult to prove that it could not do so."
This campaign isn’t just a group of stoners in somebody’s parents’ basement, no matter how easy that is to picture. Big time Silicon Valley investors are backing the movement. Dave Morin from Path, Marc Hemeon from Design Inc. (formerly at Google), and Shervin Pishevar, backer of Uber and Hyperloop One, to name a few. Yes California is a “nonviolent campaign to establish the country of California…” and has a full case listed in support of secession at YesCalifornia.org.
Louis Marinelli, President of Yes California, plans for the state to become a sovereign entity within the US, just like Scotland in the United Kingdom. The campaign is currently attempting to gather enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in Spring 2016. The secession plan would follow the model used by Catalonia to gain independence from Spain.
